Obtaining optimum performance from a high-resolutionanalog-to-digital converter (ADC) depends upon many factors.Power supply decoupling and good grounding practicesare essential to maintaining accuracy in ADCs.Poor grounding technique may manifest itself in manydifferent ways such as excessive noise, or signal crosstalk inthe system. A more difficult problem to track down is that ofpoor differential linearity error (DLE) in the converter. Thisis difficult because poor DLE may result from settling timeproblems inside the ADC, from the circuitry driving theADC having too high an output impedance at the converter’soperating frequency, from poor grounding techniques orother sources.